kids don’t dream of watching their team qualify for a tournament that will ensure its financial solvency. If that’s the point, then they might as well start cheering for a FTSE 100 company – I’m sure someone could produce a replica kit, and a set of executive trading cards. GlaxoSmithKline are looking solid for next year.

That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.

All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t let it walk away.